Wrapped Islands

Erstwhile;
2003

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The actual definition of the word "experiment" suggests focus and planning. In science, one controls variables and conducts an experiment in order to test a hypothesis. Most experimental music doesn't really fit the bill. Experimental music is usually not an attempt to discover whether a specific idea holds true under a given set of conditions; what we call "experiment" in music might better be described as "tinkering."

Tinkering is a meandering stream of connected thoughts and movements that might lead to invention: "Okay now, what happens if I put this here, yes, I see, then I tighten this screw and wait, that doesn't work, I need to put the screw underneath this fold, okay, that ought to do it. Now I make a cut here..." Tinkering is what Thomas Edison was doing when he first sat at his workbench and wrapped tin around a cylinder to see if he might make cuts into the metal analogous to sounds in the air.

Tinkering is the perfect word to describe this collaboration between Christian Fennesz and Vienna-based improv group Polwechsel. Polwechsel's MO is to create texture and reveal the inner-workings of sound itself. Accordingly, there is virtually no melody on Wrapped Islands and instruments throughout are not used in the traditional manner. Instead we get a series of drones, scrapes, brushes, taps, rustles. There is the sound of John Butcher's saxophone, but usually he blows a single note for 30 seconds and then repeats, transforming his Western instrument into a Fourth World didgeridoo. The guitars, including some of Fennesz' trademark processed strums, drift through a seemingly unrelated series of notes chosen for their geometry, with the occasional jazzy upstroke to keep a foot in the world of conventional music. A cello might be sawed or plucked or tapped or just banged around a bit to hear what happens.

The members of Polwechsel play established instruments but two of the members (and Fennesz) are also credited with "computer," and other with "electronics," so you know anything goes as far as sound. Still, the feel of Wrapped Islands is very live and in-the-moment. It's an album of quiet, subtle, low-key improv, music that rumbles and creaks like a building settling into place after a tremor, with just a hint of tense soundtrack music providing atmosphere in the background.

There is space in most of these tracks, a thousand holes of silence poked into the chattering web of sound, but my favorites have more density. Wrapped Islands is at its best when the drones gather some momentum. On "Framing 3" (the tracks are titled Framing 1 through Framing 8), a bony spine of drone, something like the gurgle of an outboard boat engine, snakes through the track giving the typically random sounds something to bounce off of. When Butcher's tenor enters for a three-note phrase, the most typically jazz-sounding bit on the entire album, the contrast in the tension is palpable. "Framing 5" is also thick and heavy, with gurgling keyboards and deep bass plucks suggesting some kind of threat.

A distant, vague sense that something is wrong prevais on Wrapped Islands, and the tone varies little from track to track. There are moments when something lighter pops out, as on "Framing 4" begins with one of the few concessions to beauty, with a graceful low-end flutter, sterile but mechanically lovely, but these vanish rather quickly into the dark, serious atmosphere of the group improvisation. This devotion to a small handful of moods suggests that Polwechsel and Fennesz had something specific in mind when they sat down together to tinker, but my sense is that they never quite found what they were looking for. Wrapped Islands seems a bit like scribbled notes in pursuit of a potentially great invention.